Bloodhound Read online

  PRAISE FOR RAMONA KOVAL

  ‘I thought I had read every “take” on the Holocaust, but Ramona Koval adds something fresh with Bloodhound: the drive to find a more appealing lineage; a rebuilding after the disaster.’

  Australian Book Review

  ‘Koval’s painstaking collection of evidence and tracing of clues is as compelling as fiction…In Bloodhound, Koval is hunter and prey to truths that taunt and console.’

  Australian

  ‘Accompanying Koval as she turns up at strange houses with flowers to solicit photographs, recollections and cell samples in picaresque fashion is made great fun… [Bloodhound is] fascinating but also somewhat disquieting.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Ramona Koval has carved a reputation as a consummate book critic and interviewer. Her passion for storytelling and sharp analysis is turned inwards in Bloodhound: Searching for My Father, in which she asks herself: what is my life story? Her accessibly written forays into the science of DNA and familial lineages, and what makes us who we are, are beautifully intertwined with her meditations on identity and belonging… [Bloodhound is] an important reminder that history should never be forgotten.’

  Books+Publishing

  ‘She’s a shining presence in the world of literature, here in Australia and right across the globe…Her voice is always recognisable, invigorating, familiar to us and greatly loved.’

  Helen Garner

  Ramona Koval is a Melbourne writer, journalist, broadcaster and editor. She is an honorary fellow in the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. From 2006 to 2011 she presented Radio National’s Book Show, and she has written for the Age and Australian. She is the author of By the Book: A Reader’s Guide to Life.

  ramonakoval.com

  @ramonakoval

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Ramona Koval 2015

  The moral right of Ramona Koval to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Contains two extracts from Antelme, Robert. The Human Race. Trans. Jeffrey Haight & Annie Mahler. Evanston: The Marlboro Press / Northwestern University Press, 1998. Originally published in French in 1957 under the title L’Espèce humaine. Copyright © 1957 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris. First published in English in 1992 by The Marlboro Press, Marlboro, Vermont. Translation copyright © 1992 by Jeffrey Haight & Annie Mahler. The Marlboro Press / Northwestern University edition published 1998 by arrangement with Éditions Gallimard. All rights reserved.

  First published in 2015 by The Text Publishing Company

  This edition published in 2016

  Book design by W. H. Chong

  All photographs courtesy of the author

  Typeset in Golden Cockerel ITC by J & M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Koval, Ramona, 1954– author.

  Title: Bloodhound : searching for my father / by Ramona Koval.

  ISBN: 9781925240900 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925095685 (ebook)

  Subjects: Koval, Ramona, 1954—Family. Holocaust survivors’ families—Australia.

  Father and child.

  Dewey Number: 929.20994

  For my grandchildren,

  and their children,

  for ten generations

  Contents

  1. Who wants to know?

  2. A shame and a disgrace

  3. Something to find, something to see

  4. Who are you again?

  5. My mother’s taste in men

  6. Who’s going to pay?

  7. The exact same shade as mine

  8. Good enough for me

  9. Who likes funerals?

  10. The pregnant boy of Kazakhstan

  11. A man is in hospital

  12. What we had to tell

  13. A goatskin jacket and a bearskin hat

  14. A good job in the infirmary

  15. Certified and apostilled

  16. The longest journey

  17. How do I look? What do they think?

  18. Stranger on a train

  19. A citizen of the earth

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  And will the dead person have exercised his right to carry a secret to his grave? After all, is that not one of the great rights of life, to know that we know something that we will never reveal to anyone?

  CARLOS FUENTES

  Oif a meisseh fregt men kain kasheh nit.

  Don’t ask questions about fairytales.

  YIDDISH PROVERB

  For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.

  ECCLESIASTES 1:18

  1

  Who wants to know?

  DAD’S eightieth-birthday party was held late last century in his favourite restaurant, a cavernous space in a middle-class Melbourne suburb, with a tiled floor for easy cleaning, possibly even hosing down, and little in the way of warmth, charm or decoration. Clearly, you were here to eat until you were full.

  Waiters balanced huge platters of food on their shoulders—grilled meats and fish and salads and dips and bread, bread, bread—delivering them to long tables of grandparents and their grandchildren, their daughters and sons-in-law, sons and daughters-in-law, and second and third cousins and their partners. The place forbade people from bringing their own drinks—instead you got them at the bar, or had them delivered to the table after a lengthy delay—and each time the waiters ventured down the aisles they were accosted by ten burly customers, hands grabbing their shirts and threatening to unbalance the heaped trays. My water! Where’s my Diet Coke? I asked for a cappuccino! It’s been ten minutes already and I’m dying of thirst!

  Dad, on this, his day, had smuggled in orange juice and mineral water in a string bag. He’d stashed the bottles under his chair, from where he sneaked them out in full view of his grandchildren, his dark-brown eyes winking loudly: for if there can be such a thing as a winking noise, Dad had it in his repertoire. He was playing the big man, as my mother might have put it, a big shot with a string bag—as if this would fool anybody.

  My mother’s voice was in my ear, but not because she was sitting beside me. Her voice lived in my head. She had been dead for twenty-one years. She didn’t make it to her fiftieth birthday, much less her eightieth. Each time Dad reached a new milestone I did the calculation. Why couldn’t it be she who was celebrating, and he who was lying dead in the ground?

  I know you’re not supposed to wish people dead. Was it his fault that he had a new wife and a new life? They had been together for at least twenty-two years—another calculation I would do, justifying my outrage on Mama’s behalf. I have always been good at calculations.

  Mama had found a photograph of a strange woman along with a small hand mirror. They had been secured by a rubber band to the underside of the sun visor on the passenger side of our family car, a white 1963 Ford Falcon that Mama and Dad were still driving in the mid-1970s. The woman was standing by a dark-green shrub, smiling at the photographer, who may have been Dad.

  She was attractive, I remember thinking, much too attractive for him, surely, a short man with greying black hair slicked straight back from his forehead. The girlfriend, as we came
to think of her, was several years older but more vital-looking than Mama, who’d had chronic myeloid leukaemia for a couple of years by then.

  Mama tucked the photo back under the sun visor and I don’t remember it being mentioned again, although she and Dad could have argued about it in Polish and I wouldn’t have known. They had a long history of fighting but also of mind games. In our family album of often out-of-focus Box Brownie black-and-white photos (all of which seemed to have been taken a long way away from the subjects, so it was hard to see who they were and what they were doing) there were two photos of Dad with another man and two women, strangers to me, on a jaunt in an open-top sports car. I’d never seen a car like that—I had no idea what they were doing together and who took the photo, why they were in the album and why Mama left them there.

  He must have known she’d find the photo behind the sun visor. It was her car, too, and surely the rubber band in her eye line was a dead giveaway. Just as he must have known that everyone at the eightieth-birthday lunch would see his contraband drinks. He must have wanted them to.

  Dad left Mama to set up house with the girlfriend, who later became his new wife, in January of the year of Mama’s October death. It sounds bad. But most family stories are complicated.

  My oldest nephew, then eleven, was sitting next to me at the birthday lunch. He was almost old enough to start preparing for his bar mitzvah, nearly a man, so he was allowed to taste the wine. I was teaching him to sip it slowly, to savour it. Not that I was an expert wine drinker. I don’t really like its taste, preferring a shot of vodka. I agree with Ogden Nash that liquor is quicker.

  Seeing this, his grandfather—and after all, this was Dad’s day, and why, he must have thought, shouldn’t he be the centre of attention—called out, ‘Hey, sonny, watch this!’ and downed a full glass of wine in three big gulps, then filled the glass to the top once more. I felt anger rise inside me as I watched him abrogate his grandfatherly duty to be wise and careful with the boy; to respect the wishes of his mother, my younger sister; and to support my gentle model-ling of responsible drinking. (These views on grandfatherly behaviour came from television and films, as I never met my grandparents.) How, I thought, and not for the first time, could the old man possibly be related to me?

  Indeed, as I cast my eyes up and down the table, I observed, again not for the first time, that there seemed to be a meeting of two tribes here. There was the straight-haired, redheaded tribe—my sister, her husband and two of their three children—and there was the taller, curly haired and blue-eyed tribe, my two daughters and me.

  Any observer would have to say—and they have, over the years—that there was little physical evidence to link these people, except that they were all at this table, everyone except Dad fearing overeating and subsequent bloatedness, here to celebrate (while swearing under their breath to get this over and done with as quickly as possible) the eightieth birthday of this man, this short Jewish tailor from Poland, this survivor who was sent to the Treblinka death camp—twice, mind you, but that’s another story—and who spent nearly two years hiding in a ‘hole in the ground’ with the Goldman brothers.

  When I heard that phrase I thought of Dad as an animal, a rat or a fox, living in a burrow. How did you do that? Later I understood that they hid in a small cellar under the kitchen floor of a rural shack. But the image of him as a hunted thing, a night scavenger, stayed with me.

  He was worried then, he once told me, that if he survived the war he would be an alcoholic after drinking daily the bootleg vodka they made from potato peelings, in part payment to the peasant who allowed them to hide there, despite the threat to his own life. How they manufactured the drink I never asked, and neither would you if you’d met the man, but there it was, his worry, and he’d tell us that the others taunted him for not wanting to drink, saying that teetotallers would wake up in the morning and know that was the best they were going to feel all day.

  For a while I thought Dad’s story of the hole in the ground and drinking and hangovers and feeling better later in the day was original. But I heard Dean Martin tell the same joke on TV in the 1960s, and I understood that Dad would’ve had no problem with lifting the joke and putting it there in the same hole he was occupying, with no regard for time and place and history. For him, jokes were more important than mere history: they were his lingua franca.

  It was my regard for time and place and history that set me off on a journey which had begun with the ambiguity and secrecy surrounding my dear dead Mama. In fact, for as long as I can remember I had wondered how I could be related to Dad.

  My Real Father, I figured, must have been someone who Mama loved, but for some reason he was unable to live with us. That is why we had Dad. Mama was a mysterious woman whose own survival story, of which I knew scant details, involved her assuming a false identity and narrowly avoiding death, thanks to her fine acting skills. It was never easy to ask her something directly and get a clear answer. She outwitted Hitler’s plans for her, so how could I hope to carry out a successful interrogation? Anyway, as you know, she died two decades before Dad’s eightieth-birthday party and the chain of events it set in motion.

  Ten years before the birthday lunch, Mama’s close friend Bernadette had called me at work. It was a surprise to hear from her, as the last time we’d spoken was a week after Mama’s death. I’d asked her then if she could tell me anything about Mama’s life and my conception. I knew in my bones that things were not straightforward, and now that Mama was no longer around to moderate my inquisitiveness I thought I could raise the topic with her best friend. But Bern was not for turning: if my mother had wanted me to know something, she would have told me herself. And if Mama had told her a secret, Bern couldn’t possibly tell me.

  I was twenty-three, a mother with a two-year-old child and pregnant with my second, and she was forty-three. I had no way of arguing with her and, besides, what did I know of the complexities of their friendship and sworn secrets?

  After that conversation, Bern disappeared from my life. I imagine she thought that I might be too curious and too persuasive and not willing to let things lie, including my dead Mama’s wishes. She might well have been right.

  And then, out of the blue, a decade after Mama’s death, Bern was on the phone telling me that a man had asked after me at a house auction in a suburb near where I lived, asking Bern if I was married and if I had children and what kind of work I did. He wanted to know if I was happy.

  The man was a stranger to me, but not to her. Bern said that if I still had any interest in finding out the circumstances of my birth, I might like to start with him. She gave me his last name, Dunne, and told me that he was one of two brothers who used to own a clothing factory in which Mama worked as a finisher, sewing on buttons and embroidering collars, before I was born.

  Why would a stranger want to know if I was happy? If I had children? Dad had never asked if I was happy.

  I looked up the name in the phone book and rang the number for a home near where the auction was held, but there was no answer. I tried to imagine the conversation that might ensue. Hello? I was wondering if you’re the man who was recently at an auction and asked a woman named Bernadette if I was married and had children and was happy—and if you are that man, are you also my Real Father? You need a certain inner strength or a well-honed sense of the absurd to go through with something like that, neither of which I was blessed with at the time. I didn’t call again.

  What was it about Dad’s eightieth birthday, then, that spurred me to follow up on the clue, many years after the opportunity first presented itself? The possibility that this might be his last birthday, and that I could finally investigate my suspicions without hurting him? That would be a noble answer.

  In truth, I was so angry with Dad for guzzling the wine—the way he undermined my careful instruction of his grandson, the way he wanted to upstage the boy, the infantile and disrespectful display of wilfulness at the table—that I left the restaurant with an overwhel
ming urge to make the connection long severed. I telephoned Bern that afternoon.

  I asked her to repeat the story of the man at the auction. And when she did, more or less word for word, I said that I thought Mama had been wrong. She had gone to her grave with a secret that wasn’t hers to keep. I had spent some years and much money on the psychoanalyst’s couch, trying to understand my estrangement from Dad. I was now in my forties, a few years younger than Mama was when she died at forty-nine. It was time to make some sense of all this.

  Bern told me that she had first met the man Dunne when Mama took her to buy men’s suits at wholesale prices from the shop at the factory where Mama had worked for two brothers in the early 1950s.

  ‘The older brother was shorter, and he was terribly kind to your mother,’ Bern said. ‘The younger one glared at her, and never spoke. But I could feel the tension between them. He ate her up with his eyes. I knew that there had been something between them, but your mother never said.’

  I liked the idea of the man eating my mother up with his eyes. She was a lovely woman, though not emotionally open, and she was terribly unhappy with Dad. They fought constantly, and I cannot remember a single act of affection between them. Never a kiss, never a warm touch.

  Bern’s story of the younger brother immediately assumed great significance. Why did he glare at Mama—why didn’t they speak? And why did she take her friend to the factory, anyway: was she hoping to irritate or inflame him? Or just to get Bern a bargain suit?

  I see Mama preparing for the venture, making sure her stockings are straight, applying lipstick, spraying Amour Amour by Jean Patou behind her ears, between her breasts and on each wrist. She holds her head high, but who knows what goes on in her mind on the way to the factory? Once there, she doesn’t speak to the man, her eyes haughty, looking straight through him, not looking down, no eyelid batting. No batting whatsoever.

  I’ve tried to buy Amour Amour in all the airports I’ve passed through, even in Paris, but it’s no longer produced. I once bought a stash from a website offering rare fragrances, but when it arrived I could smell a bad counterfeit. Jean Patou invented Joy, ‘the costliest perfume in the world’, in 1925. His Amour Amour, ‘a floral scent for brunettes’, was released in the same year. How did Mama get hold of her first bottle? I can only afford to buy perfume duty free: how could a poor factory worker develop such expensive taste?